Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Participant Observation 363
‘‘clouds’’ and she responds by saying ‘‘clouds.’’ You say ‘‘very good’’ and she
says ‘‘no brainer.’’ You can certainly pick up the learning pace after that kind
of response.
As you articulate more and more insider phrases like a native, people will
increase the rate at which they teach you by raising the level of their discourse
with you. They may even compete to teach you the subtleties of their language
and culture. When I was learning Greek in 1960 on a Greek merchant ship,
the sailors took delight in seeing to it that my vocabulary of obscenities was
up to their standards and that my usage of that vocabulary was suitably robust.
To prepare for my doctoral fieldwork in 1964–1965, I studied Greek at the
University of Illinois. By the end of 1965, after a year on the island of Kalymnos,
my accent, mannerisms, and vocabulary were more Kalymnian than
Athenian. When I went to teach at the University of Athens in 1969, my colleagues
there were delighted that I wanted to teach in Greek, but they were
conflicted about my accent. How to reconcile the fact that an educated foreigner
spoke reasonably fluent Greek with what they took to be a rural, working-class
accent? It didn’t compute, but they were very forgiving. After all, I
was a foreigner, and the fact that I was making an attempt to speak the local
language counted for a lot.
So, if you are going off to do fieldwork in a foreign language, try to find an
intensive summer course in the country where that language is spoken. Not
only will you learn the language (and the local dialect of that language), you’ll
make personal contacts, find out what the problems are in selecting a research
site, and discover how to tie your study to the interests of local scholars. You
can study French in France, but you can also study it in Montreal, Martinique,
or Madagascar. You can study Spanish in Spain, but you can also study it in
Mexico, Bolivia, or Paraguay.
You’d be amazed at the range of language courses available at universities
these days: Ulithi, Aymara, Quechua, Nahuatl, Swahili, Turkish, Amharic,
Basque, Eskimo, Navajo, Zulu, Hausa, Amoy. . . . If the language you need is
not offered in a formal course, try to find an individual speaker of the language
(the husband or wife of a foreign student) who would be willing to tutor you
in a self-paced course. There are self-paced courses in hundreds of languages
available today, many of them on CD, with lots of auditory material.
There are, of course, many languages for which there are no published
materials, except perhaps for a dictionary or part of the Judeo-Christian Bible.
For those languages, you need to learn how to reduce them to writing quickly
so that you can get on with learning them and with fieldwork. To learn how to
reduce any language to writing, see the tutorial by Oswald Werner (2000a,
2000b, 2001, 2002a, 2002b).